Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes Walkthrough & Strategy Guide

So you can pick three characters for your Marvel vs. Capcom 2 team—just grab the ones that look coolest, right? You can do whatever makes you happy, but if you want to get competitive at the game you've got to understand what goes into building a team. Just throwing together any set of characters, even if they're good characters, doesn't mean you'll have a good team with solid dynamics. You need to seriously consider how each character supports the other in order to assemble an effective Marvel vs. Capcom 2 team.

There are essentially three different roles that members of your team can fill: battery, point, and assist. Some characters successfully fill more than one of these three roles.

Battery

A battery is the most optional component of a team, but if your team dynamics call for one you'll want the battery as your first fighter. The purpose of a battery is to build up hyper meters from the second point character. An example of a good battery is Spiral, who can be very effective without using hyper meters. As well, her best tactics (trapping by throwing lots of swords) naturally build up hyper meters. Since Spiral doesn't need them, you can charge up the hyper meter for the next character who's intended to spend them.

Point

A point fighter is the fighter that's active and is usually your main character for dealing damage. A lot of effective teams consist of two point characters are forego the battery altogether, so keep that in mind. Your point character should be the character best supported by your assist.

Assist

Most top Marvel vs. Capcom 2 players use their third character almost exclusively as an assist. An assist provides an excellent backup support to your main point fighters, usually in the form of a great anti-air. Don't worry too much about the tier rating of your third character, focus more on the quality of his/her assist and how it supports your point fighter.

Stayin' Alive

As you take damage, some of your health is leftover as the red part of the life bar. This red health can actually regenerate if you let the fighter take a break, but simply tagging out to your next fighter will leave you very open. Thankfully, there are alternatives to straight-up tagging in a new fighter that'll keep you safe, though they may cost hyper bar.

Delayed Hyper Combo (DHC)

Execute a hyper combo and then quickly input the hyper combo for your second fighter to cancel the first with a DHC. This is often a good way to effectively tag out a weakened fighter without leaving the next character vulnerable, though it does cost two hyper meters. Make sure that whatever hyper combo you cancel into is a safe one, like Storm's Hail Storm or Sentinel's Hyper Sentinel Force.

Variable Counter

While blocking, input + A1 or + A2 for a variable counter, which quickly swaps out your point character for one of your assists while executing an attack. This change happens so quickly that most opponents can't react to it to punish you even if the variable counter is blocked. A variable counter does consume one hyper meter.

Safe Tagging

A simple tag maneuver ( LP + LK or HP + HK ) can leave you very vulnerable, but if you take proper precautions with the right character you can actually make it safe. As Spiral, throw a bunch of swords at the opponent and immediately follow with the tag. Your backup character will jump in behind the swords, and while he/she recovers from the tag-in animation, Spiral's swords will hold the opponent in block stun. Magneto can grab an opponent with his Hyper Grav move and then execute a safe tag. The tagged-in fighter will automatically hit the opponent that's held in Hyper Grav, making it perfectly safe.

Jump vs. Super Jump...vs. Fly Mode

Simply tapping will make your character jump, and quickly tapping will give you a super jump...which is just a really, really high jump, right? Not exactly. There are subtle differences between a regular and super jump that are important to understand.

Regular jumps give you just one action. When you perform a regular jump, you're limited to either blocking or attacking just once. Once you've used that action, you can't do anything until you land. Which means if you throw an attack, you can't block until you land. Or if you whiff an attack, you can follow it up with another attack until you land. During a super jump, you can block and attack interchangeably with no restrictions.

You can't call assists during a super jump. While you can freely call your assist attacks during a regular jump (and it doesn't count as your "one action"), you cannot call assists while super jumping. This is a very important distinction.

Fly mode is a weird hybrid of jumping and super jumping. Some characters can activate a fly mode, like Storm, Magneto, Sentinel and Iron Man. During flight, a character can still summon assists as if in a normal jump state, but can also perform more than just one action, like a super jump. However, a character in fly mode cannot guard.